Names for the Sea, page 19
Icelandic children’s culture seems full of these charming ditties. When you put these habits beside Pétur’s stories about going to the barn to share the cows’ sewage arrangements, nervous children have a dilemma. Maybe the stories replace the discipline to which everyone swears that Icelandic children are not subject. No-one tells you off, but the dark and the fields are full of waiting, hiding creatures who are out to get you.
‘And when I was driving the cows, I had to pass many stones. The first stone, we children were sure that if you put your ear to it you could hear someone spinning. Everyone had a spinning wheel then, my mother and my grandmother, because we all made our own clothes at home from the wool of our own sheep. So we thought there was a fairy woman sitting there under the stone, spinning and spinning, sitting day and night spinning, and when we were all together we would go and listen to the stone. And of course it wasn’t far from the sea. We were hearing the sea! But we thought it was the hidden woman spinning and spinning, and I was afraid of it. And further along from that stone was a huge rock, called Festusteinn, and I was afraid to pass it even in the mornings, in the sunshine. This big stone was used to fasten the ships that came. We had no quay in those days, so when ships were lying in the inlet they were made fast to this stone. There were hidden people and elves among those rocks, and people said that the Festusteinn was their church, because it was so big, and I never dared even to look in that direction. But next to it was another stone which we liked very much. It was all in steps, shaped in steps, and we called it Trappasteinn. We children used to go there in the spring and each child had a place on the steps to make cakes of mud, and there was a competition to make the nicest mud cakes. And I went on, and when I had nearly come to the place where I could leave the cows and go home, there was a big flat stone beside the road and it was called Gaujusteinn. Gauja was the name of the woman who lived in the house above that stone, which was called Foss, which means waterfall, because there were falls in the river there. And Gauja used to go to shop in the big village at the end of the fjord. It was a very nice place, one of the nicest places in Iceland, the most cultured town in the whole country, and the telephone came there first and everything came there first. They had trees everywhere.’
The connection between the ‘most cultured town’ and its trees isn’t as arbitrary as it sounds. There is a national argument about trees in Iceland. The island was forested when the settlers arrived, but has been bare since medieval Icelanders chopped all the trees down. There is a reforestation programme, regarded by some traditionalists as a bourgeois plan to make Iceland look European, put forward by intellectuals who have spent too much time i útlöndum and don’t value their own country any more. Forest seems un-Icelandic to people whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents down to the twentieth generation have known the naked contours of mountain and plain. Trees are indeed, albeit falsely, associated with being cosmopolitan.
‘So Gauja went all the way there to shop, and when she came back with her parcels she would be tired and she would sit a while on her stone and her name was Gauja so we called it Gaujusteinn, and I would sit there a few minutes myself. My uncle lived up in the rocks and they had twelve children. And the boy who looked after the cows when it wasn’t my turn, he was one of twelve as well. And I am one of twelve. There’s nobody living there now. It’s just grass.’
I can’t – wouldn’t – interrupt Vilborg. It would be like climbing onto the stage to ask an actor to repeat a word you didn’t catch. Later, I ask Pétur about the name ‘Goya’, which I haven’t heard before. Gauja, he says, the nickname for Guðríður and other Guð-prefixed women’s names. Of course.
‘Once when I was driving the cows along there, I saw a woman mowing the grass, a woman in a blue frock with a white apron and very big arms, red from the sun. And she was mowing the grass and the women never did that, because it was men’s work. I had never seen that woman before. I thought she was a giant woman, a skessa, we say, because we believed that in the old days. Icelandic trolls are very big, not small like the Danish ones. Our trolls are huge, as you know. And when I saw that she was there, just by the rock, I was so afraid that I closed my eyes, and hoped she would be gone, but when I opened them she was still there. But I had to keep driving the cows, and so I came to the field and she was still there, mowing, and she didn’t disappear at all and I was so frightened. When I came home I sat in the middle of the kitchen floor and cried. My mother didn’t know what had happened so I told her and she said, “Oh, but this is Bjargey, and she is a woman who lives with another woman and does a man’s work.” Because you see there were these homosexuals in my village and nobody bothered about it in those times. There was Margrét, who was – what do you call it, not a doctor, she was rubbing people – massage, and she lived in a very nice house with Bjargey, just the two of them. And Bjargey always did the man’s work, but I was sure she was a huldukona!
We knew that there were huldufólk, because once my aunt came to stay with us, when she needed to see the doctor in my town. My mother made coffee and she said, “Oh, something awful happened!” My mother had a brauðskeri.’
Vilborg smiles, as if she’s offering something she knows I want, but I’m not sure what it is. She shuffles forwards and begins to stand up.
‘Come upstairs and I will show you what it is, and then I will tell you a brauðskerasaga and you will understand.’
Brauðskeri. Brauð is bread. A story about bread? An awful story about bread? Vilborg puts her coffee down – she has been fitting coffee and chocolate biscuits around her storytelling. I wait while she gets her hands onto the arms of her chair and levers herself upright. We go down the narrow hall and she swings herself up the tight little staircase. She takes me into her bedroom. The bed is made and there are books everywhere, colonising the dressing table and the chair by the bed, creeping along the skirting boards. They are mostly hardbacks, as many in English as in Icelandic. The collected works of D. H. Lawrence lean on each other by the bed. A monograph on Frida Kahlo keeps Jude the Obscure and The Woman in White apart.
‘Here!’ says Vilborg, removing a volume of poetry in Danish, something by Philip Roth and Mrs Dalloway from what looks at first like a small iron bookshelf, the sort of thing I have on my desk at home to hold the books I’m working on. ‘Look, it’s very nice.’ She removes some more books. ‘My mother used to make very good, big rye bread. Everything was baked at home.’
Vilborg holds up the brauðskeri but it’s heavy, built like an old German sewing machine. It’s a kind of guillotine, with a shelf that would hold a loaf the size of George Eliot’s complete works in hardback. ‘Brauðskeri is its name, the bread-cutter, and you see it’s quite a thing! So now I will tell you the story.’
I help her put the books back and we go downstairs again.
‘My mother used to keep her brauðskeri in the pantry, which had a window that opened onto the hillside. The window was small, half the size of that one, narrow as windows were in those days.’ The windows in this house are nineteenth-century, urban, Danish-influenced and probably not, really, ideal for the climate, since they must originally have had the same kind of draughty glazing that makes our Canterbury house so cold. ‘You could open a small part of it, but because the house was built into the slope, the window was just in the ground, and therefore if it was open, a chicken would fly into it, and so there was wire mesh over it. So you couldn’t put your hand through, and this apparatus, this brauðskeri, was too big to pass through. And my mother wanted to cut some bread, and the brauðskeri wasn’t there. Nobody had done anything with it, but it wasn’t there, and it wasn’t on the table, and it was not anywhere. And who should steal it? No-one knew particularly where it was, and anyone who did not own such a nice thing would own a knife. And my mother’s sister was what was called skyggn, she could see things that other people could not see, and she said to my mother, “Don’t worry, it comes back. I met a woman who lives in the rock in the next field, and she was holding it, she put her apron over it when she saw me, and she will give it back.” And the next day it was back in its place! And they believed it, my mother believed it, though what it is, I don’t know. Sometimes you don’t see things, and next time you look they are there, so all this about things disappearing does happen, it does! They were telling the truth as they saw it. They believed in ghosts also, the grown-ups did, and of course we had only candle-light and lanterns, we had very nice lanterns, and you had to put them all out at night. I often think about it; we would go to the doorstep and see if they were putting out the lights in this house or that, and of course you are not allowed to leave the light on when you go to sleep. That’s how my uncle died. He forgot to put the lantern out and the house burnt down and he died. That did happen, you had to be careful with lanterns and candles.’
‘We were of course quite many in each bed. The little boys had a bed, I was sleeping with my sister and my grandmother was in the room also, and she kept the light. So when she said goodnight and put the light out, everyone had to sleep. But I put a book under my pillow and when the moon came out, I did read it, although it was forbidden. The moon shone in the window, right at me, because we didn’t have curtains up there. There were curtains for the dining room and for my parents’ bedroom and for the kitchen window, my mother was very handy with her needle and she made everything. This village, you know, there is not a house there now. Everything, it’s all away. All gone.’
Vilborg offers me another biscuit, a slice of green pepper. I wasn’t expecting her to say that, although I know many of the coastal villages are now deserted, cut off by the roads instead of connected by the boats, the people sucked out to Reykjavík as if caught in a vortex. Listening to Vilborg is like reading, and I was seeing the page on her pillow by moonlight, hearing the sighs and rustles after her grandmother had blown out the lantern, imagining her mother with a lapful of heavy curtain material and the needle gleaming by firelight. It’s all away.
‘People believed in their dreams, too, and they would tell fortunes in a coffee cup.’ She picks up her cup, half-full of cold coffee. ‘You drink the coffee three times.’ She swallows what’s left in three gulps. ‘You turn it three times.’ She swirls the dregs around the cup. ‘You turn it over, like that, and let it dry. And then you read it. They were always doing that, at home. My mother was very keen on it, telling the cups. The neighbours did so. It was very common when I was a child.’
It must be another not-very-old Icelandic tradition. Surely people in the villages didn’t regularly have coffee until not long before Vilborg’s childhood? I think about the Atlantic journeys of early twentieth-century coffee beans.
‘Did you believe it?’ I ask.
‘My mother liked to do it. She knew everybody, and she knew what was going on beneath the surface, but she thought she saw it in the cups. She didn’t see the huldukonur, only her sister saw those, but she saw ghosts and such beings and she had dreams. My great-grandfather was also like that, it runs in families. People used to come and tell her what they needed to tell, and when there was trouble in a house it was my mother who would be called. She was always there if something bad was happening. Because life was hard, you know. By the time I was fifteen, three of my brothers and three of my sisters were dead. My sisters were fifteen and twenty and twenty-four, and they died within six months of tuberculosis. Two of my brothers died very young. One was two years old, it was the year I was born, 1930, he was ill and there was a doctor there but no medicines, nothing to help. And the other was in his first year and there was a bug that was going around and it affected his lungs. The doctor wasn’t sure, he didn’t know. My brother just got very ill and they didn’t – they didn’t do anything.’
Vilborg’s voice breaks for the first time, although she’s talked to me by now about her dead husband and her abandoned village and Iceland’s betrayal of Jewish refugees and her son’s emigration to California and the financial collapse of her country (though I’m beginning to understand that Icelanders older than I am have seen more than one previous collapse and resurrection). Vilborg’s pleasure in life, her appetite for new people and new stories and new journeys, isn’t because she has nothing to cry about.
‘And then my brother Jóhann drowned in 1946. There were twenty – twenty young sailors that day.’ She breaks off, swallows. ‘We lost so many men.’ We wait. I can say nothing for her loss, thirty years before I was born. It would feel like an insult to pat her hand. ‘That was the ninth of February nineteen-hundred-and-forty-six.’ She says February with both ‘r’s, as even Pétur with his perfect diction does not, and speaks the date as if standing at the cenotaph.
‘There came bad weather, and in this weather twenty young sailors – there were three boats and five men in each and another boat, twenty young sailors. And on his boat, Jóhann was twenty-one, it was nearly his birthday, and there was another of twenty-two and three of nineteen. It was like that. Last year is the first year in the history of Iceland that we don’t lose anybody at sea. Jóhann was not a fisherman, not at sea. He worked on the land, and my mother had made him promise that he wouldn’t go to sea, because he was named after my uncle who drowned and we have a tradition in Iceland that you don’t name a child for someone who dies like that. But one man who was meant to be on the boat got drunk and broke his leg, and they were going to sea very early in the morning. At first my brother refused, but they somehow forced him, and he made them swear not to tell my mother. They were in Hafnarfjörður, you see, at the winter fishing. They promised they wouldn’t tell my mother he had been to sea, but then he didn’t come back. And it was a hard thing to lose him.’
Vilborg passes me a small book from the table at her side. Old leather binding, the size of my palm. Inside, pasted to black pages, are sepia photographs. Her parents, born in 1886 and 1895. The mother of the first Jóhann, born in 1860. Then there are pictures of the village, hard to understand in soft brown and a quarter the size of a postcard.
‘Did you climb these mountains?’ I ask. I’m wondering if the only way out was by sea, if the mountains felt like a wall.
She pours coffee for me. ‘No. Because I was only ten when the soldiers came. And then the fjord was locked, it was a fortress, and the girls were not allowed to wander about when the soldiers were there.’
‘Why not?’ I ask. National security or a fear of what foreign soldiers might do to Icelandic little girls?
‘Well, because they were up in the mountains as well. Going round about and spying after the Germans or whatever. I always felt very safe, though. Because my village was locked, they locked it, and you had to show a passport given by the army if you wanted to come in. It was because from my village you could see right across the firth, whereas in town the mountains block the view, you can see only a little piece of sky. They put gates at the road, and a barrier and a guard standing there day and night, and a barrier across the fjord and a ship guarding day and night, and there were mines in the water, because all the ships coming from Murmansk and going to America and back would use our fjord as a refuge, and the submarines would see them coming and try to sink them. And they put big guns up in front of the church. There was no shelter for the Icelanders when the aeroplanes came, only for the soldiers. Down on the road by the gate there was a flagpole, and of course we knew when they flew a yellow flag there were planes nearby. And when the planes came they would shoot from the big gun by the church, first three times three and then they were shooting everywhere. They would shoot and shoot so the planes couldn’t come down, and three times they shot a plane. The inhabitants of Seyðisfjörður were only a thousand people then, and the British army brought over two thousand. And then came these convoys from Russia and America, and huge ships that a plane could land on as well. So you can imagine how it was then. But I was very secure. The navy officers lived in our house and if I wanted to go anywhere, they sent men to escort me.’
‘They lived in your house?’
‘They came on a huge ship and they took every house, they took the school. It was a cold springtime, rainy, and when there is much rain there can come a landslide. There was a place in between the villages where there were no buildings because there had been a big avalanche, the year before my mother was born, 1895, and over twenty people died. And first the soldiers came and put up their tents and a big wind came and blew away the tents and all their things and they were running about. They had been sleeping when the storm began and we children thought it was funny to see them running around so. And they did repair the tents and the other things, those that hadn’t blown out to sea, and they wanted to build their barracks there, under the mountain where there were no buildings because it wasn’t safe. They were told that they weren’t allowed to build there but they said it was all right, their buildings are shaped like polytunnels and the landslide will pass over, and they put all their tents there again. And so the policeman and the magistrate and everyone went there and told them they had to move, they did not allow any man to stay because it is dangerous. And the landslide came that night and all the things, the big guns and so on, went down into the sea, and if the men had stayed they would have been killed. So then they knocked on the doors and they said, “Is there a room your family doesn’t need? We will have it.” And they were in my grandparents’ house, because there were no children there and my grandfather had been dead a long time, and there was a lounge and an office, the two biggest, smartest rooms in the house, and they had their own special door for coming and going, and of course they paid rent. They were nice. But the officers got the houses while the men lived in barracks. The Icelanders got much work from them, making their buildings and so on, selling them fish. There had been a crisis and lack of work, but then came the British rule.’
